A review on design, manufacture and mechanics of composite risers

Exploration of deeper oceans for oil and gas requires increasingly lightweight solutions. A key enabler in this aspect is the use of fiber-reinforced composite materials to replace metals in risers. However, design synthesis and analyses of composite risers are more challenging than for conventional metals due to the complex behavior and damage mechanisms which composite materials exhibit. Composite risers are predicted to be a high-impact technology that will be mainstream in the medium term but there is still relatively little literature pertaining directly to the behavior of these materials under the complex loading scenarios arising from their use in deep water structures. Therefore there is a need to perform a review and assessment of the available technologies and methodologies in the literature to gain a good understanding of their predictive capabilities, efficiency and drawbacks. This article provides a comprehensive review of published research on manufacture, experimental investigations and numerical analyses of composite risers in deepwater conditions determining the gaps and key challenges for the future to increase their application.